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Channel Terminating Unit for 2GHz Digital Microwave System |
Prompted
by the development of new types of sophisticated field programmable devices (FPDs),
the process of designing digital hardware has changed dramatically over the past
few years. Unlike previous generations of technology, in which board level designs
included large numbers of SSI chips containing basic gates, virtually every digital
design produced today consists mostly of high-density devices. This applies not
only to custom devices like processors and memory, but also for logic circuits
such as state machine controllers, counters, registers, and decoders. When such
circuits are destined for high volume systems they have been integrated into high-density
gate arrays. However, gate array NRE costs often are too expensive and gate arrays
take too long to manufacture to be viable for prototyping or other low volume
scenarios. For these reasons, most prototypes, and also many production designs
are now built using FPDs. The
most compelling advantages of FPDs are instant manufacturing turnaround, low startup
costs, low financial risk and (since programming is done by the end user) ease
of design changes. The market for FPDs has grown dramatically over the past decade
to the point where there is now a wide assortment of devices to choose from. A
designer today faces a daunting task to research the different types of chips,
understand what they can best be used for, choose a particular manufacturer's
product, learn the intricacies of vendor specific software and then design the
hardware. Confusion for designers is exacerbated by not only the sheer number
of FPDs available, but also by the complexity of the more sophisticated devices.
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